I can't reasonably get the TB booster any longer (though I usually get them anyway) because I constantly test positive, due to being exposed (and on a fun antibiotic cycle) when I was younger. This also means I can't give blood, most times, but it doesn't mean I don't advocate the testing / booster shots for everyone else.

I can't reasonably get the TB booster any longer (though I usually get them anyway) because I constantly test positive, due to being exposed (and on a fun antibiotic cycle) when I was younger. This also means I can't give blood, most times, but it doesn't mean I don't advocate the testing / booster shots for everyone else.

First let me say I am in favor of vaccinations, but I've never understood the statements that letting unvaccinated children into public schools is a danger to the other children. Isnt that why the other children got the vaccine? Wouldnt it only be a danger to their own children and children with like minded parents? Im not trying to win an argument or anything. I genuinely want to know.

But I do think that vaccinations shouldn't be mandatory. I get very worried about the government forcing things into your body. I think we need to instead increase the education on the benifits of vaccinations so people volenteer to get them. You can call me a conspiracy nut if you want, but I get worried when the government starts forcing things into your body without any say from you.

First let me say I am in favor of vaccinations, but I've never understood the statements that letting unvaccinated children into public schools is a danger to the other children. Isnt that why the other children got the vaccine? Wouldnt it only be a danger to their own children and children with like minded parents? Im not trying to win an argument or anything. I genuinely want to know.

Okay:

(1) For many vaccines, there is a small failure rate. That is, even if you get the vaccine, there is a body of people that simply do not pick up the immunity conferred by it. Not to mention that some vaccines wear off over time - pertussis, for one. And there is no way to know whether or not immunity was conferred until you're actually hit with the infection. These people are completely dependent on herd immunity to avoid infection. Unvaccinated kids running around the same classrooms brings that risk back in.

(2) It is still possible to be a carrier of a disease even if you are personally immune to it. Chicken pox follows this model. Unvaccinated kids running around increase that risk of transmission, and in particular to the younger children in the family who aren't old enough to have the vaccine yet. Try and imagine the sheer, impotent horror as you stand over your four-week-old baby's crib while she coughs herself to death from pertussis -- whooping cough. It kills babies, mainly because the baby's immune system isn't developed enough to even withstand the weakened version of the illness that constitutes the vaccination.

(3) In the more general sense, unvaccinated people put others at risk because the unvaccinated decrease herd immunity. They decrease the proportion of a population that has immunity to a given illness. If that proportion drops below a certain number, the disease can move much more freely through the population because it has enough people to "jump" to. Herd immunity is a double protection -- it makes sure the disease can't move, and when it does move, it doesn't find a susceptible target.

This is not the guv'ment forcing you to have things in your body. It's a good seventy years or so of peer-reviewed, replicated science across the entire planet telling you you're an idiot if you don't have said things in your body. I've no problem with personal freedoms until those personal freedoms start seriously hurting or killing other people who have no capacity to defend themselves.

I didnt know about the carrier aspect of the vaccination. I always figured when you were vaccinated it killed the disease before it got to the contagious stage.

Im still torn on the mandatory vaccination though. Call it a personal flaw, but it just sound wrong. I admit you have a perfectly logical argument in favor of it but I personally cant get past it. How would you enforce it. Send people to jail if they refuse? Strap them down and force them to? I think the better path would be massive education on the benifits of vaccinations. It would take longer to get it up to the herd vaccination levels but I think it would stilll get there. Cause at that point it would only be those who are allergic, religous detractors(correct usage?), and the completely stupid who would not be getting them.

Katana_Geldar and I come from the same country, which I think has a nice way of dealing with it: sure, you can be unvaccinated if you want, though it takes conscientious objection. But you're not getting into a child care centre or many schools without a fully-filled-out vaccination record, and there's no comeback by way of Equal Opportunity whinging for that. I personally think that's still too gutless by the government, but luckily I don't have to win national popularity contests every four years or so.

And one might note that the West is massively educated on the benefits of vaccinations. It doesn't matter. There are enough idiots out there who think the government is inserting alien DNA in with every shot to bring down vaccination rates sufficiently that these diseases are spreading through populations.

But thats what the aliens want you to think. Dont mind this RFID chip being injected into you with the alien plasma. You just believe everything the puppet masters tell you dont you?

On a serious note, at least in the US, there has been a big drop in our ceritical thinking and science education and I feel that has an effect on the countries perception of vaccines among other things. They feel it is a non essential treatment, so they begin to think of other reasons why they are being pushed so hard. You would be amazed at how many people will believe a youtube video about autism from vaccines just cause they were never taught how to do proper research into a subject. Even I wasnt sure on the exact mechanisms of how it worked before you explained it to me. And of people my age(that I know), I am way more educated than most in science. I think a large number of parents get the vaccines for their children only cause the school district tells them they should, not because of an overwelming knowledge of the benifits of immunization.

Thank, in part, those in Republican/Tea Party controlled states who tend to dismantle the education systems in those states more often than not (and are often the first to slash education during economic downtimes).

To add to @Saintheart's point, there's also that if there's no herd immunity there's more of a chance of diseases becoming drug - resistant to both anti - biotics/anti - viral treatments or even becoming resistant to the vaccines themselves. So bottom line it's really important to get people vaccinated.

On how mandatory vaccinations are enforced here: public and private schools and child care centers require a record of the child's vaccinations or the child cannot attend. People who homeschool can get away with not vax'ing.

The issue here is not that the education's been dismantled by Republicans. Here's a listing of vaccination rates by state. The bottom ten are 5 Republican controlled, 5 Democrat controlled. The top ten are 7 Republican controlled, 1 Democrat controlled, one split legislature, and Nebraska's non-partisan legislature. I think to try to put this on partisan drives misses where the cause really is.

There's been a strong push to create fear of vaccines, be it claims of autism, be it that there can be negative reactions, be it getting sick anyway, etc. The reason it's working now rather than in the past isn't that critical thinking has dropped in recent years. It's that fear of the diseases being vaccinated against has declined. Part of this is what diseases are being vaccinated against. Very few people today in the US have strong memories of polio as this, for example. So when there was a vaccination against that, there was little question that was a better option that what they were facing. Now, though, some of the diseases are things like measles that many people don't have any real idea what hey would be like. Others, people don't commonly realise how serious they can be. The flu is viewed as this casual disease that you just get over, but the estimates are that its killed somewhere between 3,000 and 49,000 people each year (some years higher, some lower) and when people aren't aware of that, the flu isn't as frightening. The very reason vaccines are questioned now is specifically because they've worked so well for decades that the diseases we're stopping now are ones that simply aren't as lethal as where we started (polio in 1916 killed 2000 in New York City alone) and medicine as a field has advanced so much that people don't realise that these are still potentially deadly diseases.

The other thing that's forgotten is that this is not just protecting other kids that could've gotten the vaccine and didn't. It protects those that could not get the vaccine for legitimate reasons. In Australia, the parents of Dana McCaffery have been very publicly critical of the anti-vaccine movement after she died from whooping cough at 4 weeks old. Too young to be vaccinated yet, whooping cough is a disease that, in this day and age in Australia, she should have never been exposed to, but people have stopped vaccinating and these diseases are starting to reemerge. Anyone with weakened health that prevents immunization is reliant on the herd immunity for protection.

What I don't get about the religious exemptions, though, and in particular some of the earlier comments in here... is I don't see any way in which the government can legitimately decide that one person's religious exemption is valid and another person's isn't. I don't see how it can attempt to pick and choose in that regard.

You mentioned the flu as viewed as a casual disease; I would add chicken pox to that. For people my age it was pretty much a rite of passage. I got it in first grade along with most of the rest of my class, I gave it to my sister who was two years old at the time, and we were done, except for the scar I still have on my shoulder. I questioned why the hell my kids needed to be vax'ed for chicken pox but I got them the vaccine.

As it turns out, though, besides being dangerous for the immunocompromised and the encephalitis risk, there is also the risk of staph infections from kids scratching the bumps, and for whatever reason (maybe Vaderize could shed some light on this) we hear a lot more about staph infections now than we did 30-40 years ago.

There's also the fact that shingles is a deadlier form of chicken pox for older adults and just as contagious (as a CNA I've had to care for people who've contracted the shingles and have had to put on every percaution in the world to avoid contamination and infection myself). And if you've had it then your at extreme risk for it and also need to be vaccinated against that and most older adults aren't even aware of it (which is why you see those commercials for how bad shingles can be now). So definitely vax for chicken pox for the kids and especially if you've had chicken pox vaccinate for shingles.

What I don't get about the religious exemptions, though, and in particular some of the earlier comments in here... is I don't see any way in which the government can legitimately decide that one person's religious exemption is valid and another person's isn't. I don't see how it can attempt to pick and choose in that regard.

On that, my personal formula is as stated above: your personal freedoms are fine until they start injuring or killing people, particularly those who can't fight back. That goes for religious freedoms as well. The freedom not to vaccinate is worse than the freedom to own a gun, because as an unvaccinated person you literally have no control over the lethal weapon you are carrying around with you every day.

As the world gets more globalised and as national barriers are gradually eroded, this is going to become a bigger and bigger problem, since diseases will spread much faster around the world. Based on current vaccination rates and the prevalence of deadly diseases, the planet wins the equivalent of the sweepstakes lottery every single day based on the fact we have not faced a viral apocalypse on the order of the 1918-9 flu pandemics. The 1918 pandemic killed 3-5% of the entire planet's population, and given the King of Spain himself was laid low by it -- thus creating the misnomer of "Spanish Flu" -- it was no respecter of class or education.

Science won. The hippies lost. It's time to stop pussyfooting around on this issue.

As it turns out, though, besides being dangerous for the immunocompromised and the encephalitis risk, there is also the risk of staph infections from kids scratching the bumps, and for whatever reason (maybe Vaderize could shed some light on this) we hear a lot more about staph infections now than we did 30-40 years ago.

The reason you're hearing more about staph infections is because staph these days wears a red cape and a blue suit with a yellow-and-red "S" on its chest. MRSA is the more common name for some strains of stapyhylococcus aureus, or "Golden staph". The MR, of course, standing, for Methicillin-resistant. That is, we can't kill it with the usual medications that destroyed it in the past. It's become resistant. And golden staph basically weakens the immune system, makes it easier for secondary infections to then murder the organism with a compromised immune system. Golden Staph turns up a lot in hospitals, and half the time it's due to not following simple stuff like washing their hands or properly sterilising surfaces. To say nothing of the petri dishes that constitute those lovely white coats that some medical practitioners like to wear around from one patient to the next.

Medicine-resistant organisms are a huge problem, because if you can't kill it, you can't control it. The concept of controlling them is much like herd immunity for vaccine-treatable illnesses: if you properly sterilise -- wash your hands at the very least after going to the toilet or before preparing food -- you reduce staph's ability to move in the population and its capacity to develop resistance to the treatments we use against it.

Makes sense, and I think some of that goes back to the over prescription of antibiotics 30-40 years ago; diseases mutated. And then there are people like me who are allergic to about 75 percent of the antibiotics out there, but anyway...

I've heard a lot about hand sanitizer being blamed for drug-resistant superbugs; I don't use the stuff much except at work (kids returning books usually means germs) but I don't have an opinion on that either.

Hand sanitizers aren't responsible for drug-resistant superbugs, mainly because your average sweet-smelling hand sanitizer is no more effective than snake oil.

The FDA says they should only be used in conjunction with soap and water, not as a substitute for it. Basically a proper, alcohol-heavy -- at least 60% -- hand sanitizer strips a layer of skin off and thus takes the oil with it, thus in theory destroying the areas bacteria inhabit. But a proper, alcohol-heavy sanitizer also doesn't feel much good, can cause chapping over time, and if it's a potent hospital-grade one can actually sting when it hits your hands, so many sanitizers, including the so-called "natural" ones, don't have enough alcohol in them.

(In passing, I can testify personally to the chapping: when my daughter wasborn premature, people coming into and departing her ward were required to sanitize their hands with a proper, hospital-grade sanitizer. That sucker killed. And because my wife and I would be in and out over the days, it didn't take long for my hands to start flaking as if my dandruff had migrated to my palms. But it was a premature babies' ward, and they were damn good at what they did, so I happily paid the price.)

And that's before you get to what can be misleading claims about the effectiveness of the sanitizers: the claim it destroys "99.6% of all bacteria" does not necessarily mean it's been measured as doing that on a human hand. More likely it's been measured as doing so on an inert surface. Life is not quite so neat. Frankly you could probably get a better hand sanitizer by moseying on up to Uncle Jethro's still and dipping your hands in his backyard moonshine. It's the alcohol content that does the job, and even then it doesn't work if your hands are visibly soiled because alcohol doesn't cut through grime terribly well.

Soap and warm-to-hot water is still one of the best sanitisers we have to hand (b-boom tss) and which we can use on a daily basis: minimum of ten seconds' lathering (sing a nursery rhyme to yourself), making sure you clean front, back, lace your fingers together to put soap between them, scrub your nails against your palms to get some soap under the nail, and form a fist around your whole thumb to make sure you cover the whole hand.

The mercury link has been debunked. Thiomerosal does not cause autism, period.

The original study, and its author, have been discredit for amongst other things, manufacturing evidence.

Peace,

V-03

Wasn't that doctor from the UK? McCarthy and the whole hysteria she raised from her book and media appearances was based on made up evidence. Sad episode. But some people would rather believe a celebrity than doctors. To be fair, she was likely concerned for her own son, but she took it to the next level when she became a public advocate.

Makes sense, and I think some of that goes back to the over prescription of antibiotics 30-40 years ago; diseases mutated.

It is mostly just this. However, the primary source of antibiotic abuse has not been human, but the cattle industry. Even as everyone else has noted the danger and tried to be more intelligent in their use of antibiotic, they continue the lazy, dangerous carpet-bombing approach. Their usage is several multiples greater than from any other situation, and has contributed demonstrably to the increasing prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Including several that either were always dangerous to humans or have crossed over to become such. This is one piece in the much larger story of the need for reform in industrial agriculture.